Gastrointestinal cancer, including cancers of the oesophagus, stomach, small intestine, colon, rectum and liver etc, is a major medical and economic burden worldwide. Although the incidence and mortality of gastrointestinal cancer has been gradually decreasing for decades, some common types of gastrointestinal cancer are steadily in the top five leading cause of new cancer cases and deaths, such as gastric cancer, colon and rectal cancer[1]. Multiple factors have been proposed to play important roles in human carcinogenesis, however, the exact mechanism of gastrointestinal cancer development still remains unclear.

Mammalian cells contain three functional RAS proto-oncogenes, known as H-RAS, K-RAS, and N-RAS, which encode small GTP-binding proteins in terms of p21^rass. The RAS proteins are GTPases that bind to GTP and GDP nucleotides[2]. The switch between their inactive (GDP-bound) and active (GTP-bound) forms, together with their ability to bind to target proteins, provides the mechanism for the downstream transmission of the cellular signals. Their natural role is to relay extracellularly derived signals to a number of pathways controlling cellular proliferation and differentiation[3]. RAS genes have been elucidated as major participants in the development and progression of a series of human tumours, such as gastrointestinal cancer, lung cancer and breast cancer. It was reported that just one point mutation occurring in codon12, 13 or 61 could result in continuous stimulation of cell proliferation or, alternatively, a 5- to 50-fold amplification of the wild type gene[4]. As a result, the codon12, 13 and 61 are also called mutation hotpots. Numerous epidemiological studies on pancreatic, gastric, colorectal and non-small cell lung cancer evaluate the potential role of these mutation hotspots, but the results are still conflicting up to now [5–8].

Besides the mutation hotspots of H-RAS mentioned above, another single nucleotide polymorphism at H-RAS cDNA position 81 T→C (rs12628), primarily found by Taparowsky et al in 1982[9], was shown to be associated with the risk of human cancers as well. Johne's research indicated that the individuals harbouring the homozygous C-genotype of the H-RAS T81C were at an increased risk of bladder cancer [10]. More recently, it was demonstrated that the variant C allele of this genetic polymorphism could increase the risk of oral carcinoma, particularly in male population[11]. However, the number of studies conducted to examine the H-RAS T81C polymorphism is not sufficient; moreover, the results of them are controversial yet. Especially, there is a lack of investigation on gastrointestinal cancer, such as gastric, colon and rectal cancer.

Therefore, in the present research, we hypothesize that the H-RAS T81C polymorphism may have an effect on the H-RAS expression and activity, and ultimately may play a role in modulating the susceptibility to gastrointestinal cancer. In order to verify our hypothesis, a population based case-control study was conducted to investigate the association between the H-RAS T81C genotypes and the risk of gastrointestinal cancer in Chinese population. In addition, a meta-analysis was performed to estimate the risk of H-RAS T81C polymorphism for cancers.

The observed genotype distributions of H-RAS T81C among cases and controls were shown in Table 1 as well. In healthy controls, the frequencies of TT, TC and CC genotypes were 79.24%, 19.87% and 0.89%, which did not deviate from the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (χ² = 0.375, p = 0.541), while those frequencies were 53.33%, 44.44% and 2.22% in gastric cancer patients, respectively. The frequency of C allele observed in gastric cancers was about 24.44% which was significantly higher than that in controls 10.83% (χ² = 24.413, p < 0.0001). Meanwhile, the frequencies of C allele in colon cancer and rectal cancer, 12.90% and 12.39% respectively, were also higher than that in controls. However, no significant difference in genotype or allele distribution was found among colon cancer, rectal cancer and controls (data not shown).

Three other studies on H-RAS T81C polymorphism and cancer risk were available in the literature including bladder, thyroid and oral cancer patients. Because of the small sample size of these studies, we carried out a meta-analysis to obtain an overall assessment of the effects of the H-RAS T81C polymorphism on human cancers, which was examined according to H-RAS genotype in all published studies and in our patients. As presented in Fig. 1, the test for heterogeneity was not significant (χ² = 9.87, p = 0.02), suggesting that the random effect model could be used to assess the odds ratio. The pooled odds ratio was 1.38 (95% CI, 1.01–1.98), which was significant.

A multi-factorial model of human carcinogenesis is currently accepted, according to which different dietary and non-dietary factors, including genetic susceptibility, are involved at different stages in the cancer process[15]. RAS gene, serving as molecular switches in pivotal processes governing cellular growth and differentiation, have been found to be amplified and over expressed in gastric carcinomas[16, 17]. Several molecular alternations in RAS gene have been identified such as minisatellites and mutations, however, research on the single nucleotide polymorphism in RAS gene was rare [18–20]. In the present study, analyses of the polymorphism of H-RAS T81C in gastrointestinal cancer patients were carried out compared with healthy controls. The frequency of C allele in the Chinese healthy population was 10.83%, which was lower than that in Johne's study (26.42% in Germany)[10] and Sathyan's study (20.00% in India)[11]. This observation indicates that the distribution of H-RAS T81C polymorphism seems to be genetically different in various ethnics. In the aforementioned study, they reported that H-RAS 81CC homozygous genotype showed 2-fold risk of bladder cancer and oral cancer. In this study, a statistically significant increased risk for gastric cancer was observed in the TC and CC genotypes combination compared to the TT genotype, and the adjusted OR achieved 3.65, which indicated that H-RAS T81C polymorphism is a strongly susceptibility factor for the development of gastric cancer. On the other hand, we did not find any association of H-RAS T81C polymorphism with colon cancer and rectal cancer, which derived from the same population.

However, this epidemiological study could not provide the mechanism by which H-RAS T81C polymorphism modifies risk of different kinds of cancer. Although RAS gene is ubiquitously expressed, the mRNA analysis reveals different tissue expression levels suggesting that RAS family members probably are expressed in a tissue specificity fashion[3]. K-RAS is mostly expressed in the pancreas, colorectal and non-small cell lung cancer, while H-RAS is common in squamous cell carcinomas, bladder carcinomas and renal cancers. K-RAS mutations have been found in 15%–68% of sporadic colorectal cancer[21]. Keller et al. reported that endogenous K-RAS resulted in the most dramatic effect of the RAS isoforms (K > H or N) in human colorectal cancer cells[22]. However, K-RAS mutations are rarely observed in gastric cancer[17, 23, 24] and increased expression of the H-RAS oncogene product was found in gastric cancer[25, 26]. Consistent with the tissue specificity hypothesis, our finding suggested that the H-RAS gene played a more important role in gastric cancer than in colorectal cancer. Although this polymorphism does not lead to the alternation of RAS protein structure, it affects the cancer susceptibility possibly through linkage disequilibrium with other potential functional variant of H-RAS. One of the linkage candidate is a region of variable tandem repeats about 1 kb downstream exon4, with a possible transcriptional enhancer activity[27]. Another associated polymorphic site is hexanucleotide repeat located about 80 bp upstream of the 5'-end of exon1[28]. Recently, it is reported that H-RAS T81C might be serve as a marker of other polymorphisms in intron D2 of H-RAS that would act as regulators of IDX inclusion[29]. As it was not examined in the present study, it would be interesting to conduct more studies on the linkage of H-RAS T81C polymorphism with the other candidate polymorphic sites in order to reveal the underlying mechanism.

It has been suggested that sample size is always an issue of concern in the case-control analysis and statistical power of the analysis would generally increase with increasing size of sample[30]. We only recruited 296 survival cases and the sample size might not be large enough to detect the low penetrance effect of the genes, especially for the SNPs with low frequency. Therefore, we pooled all published data together with ours, and then performed a meta-analysis to examine the association between the H-RAS T81C polymorphism and the cancer risk. Overall, the C allele carriers, including TC genotype and CC genotype carriers, have a 38% increased risk of cancer. It is reasonable to believe that the variant of H-RAS gene could be associated with cancer risk, and it will be of interest in test if this genetic polymorphism is associated with increased risk of other malignant tumors.

Another limitation should be addressed in this study. Helicobacter pylori infection has been defined as a crucial risk factor for gastric cancer by numerous intensive researches, which lead to an improved understanding of the etiology and pathogenesis [31]. Unfortunately, information of Helicobacter pylori infection in our study is not available, as a result of that we can not analyze the interaction between H-RAS polymorphism and Hp infection status.

In summary, this study provides the evidences that the polymorphism of H-RAS T81C may be a risk factor for the development of gastric cancer in a Chinese population. Because this is the first study to report the significant association between H-RAS T81C polymorphism and gastric cancer susceptibility, additional studies with large sample size and detailed Hp infection information on gastric cancer are warranted in different ethnic populations to confirm our findings.